Menu Odigos Gaia Thesis Mother Dear Far & Wide Honour Thy Mother What Went Wrong? Please Come Back! Witches Salem Witches Ask Odi Whyte Bard Stories Aesop's Fables Follow The Frog            Honour Thy Mother In all the cultures where She is still worshipped, there is no confusion over Her identity : She is Nature, and She is the Earth. She is not an abstraction, not a metaphor, not a construct of consciousness. Her body is of substance as material as our own, and we tread upon Her breast and are formed of Her flesh. "Walk lightly on the bosom of the Earth Mother," says Sun Bear, and traditional Native Americans agree. Cherokee shaman Rolling Thunder emphasizes that "It's very important for people to realize this: the Earth is a living organism, the body of a higher individual who has a will and wants to be well, who is at times less healthy or more healthy, physically and mentally." (Doug Boyde - Rolling Thunder 1974) Frank Waters, author of Masked Gods and Book of the Hopi, makes the same point. 'To Indians the Earth is not inanimate, it is a living entity, the mother of all life, our Mother Earth. All Her children, everything in nature, is alive: the living stone, the great breathing mountains, trees and plants, as well as birds and animals and man. All are united in one harmonious whole.' (Frank Waters - Lessons From The Indian Soul - Psychology Today (May 1973)). Renowned historian Arnold Toynbee, writing on "The Religious Background of the Present Environmental Crisis," also observed that: 'For pre-monotheistic man, nature was not just a treasure-trove of "natural resources". Nature was, for him, a goddess, "Mother Earth," and the vegetation that sprang from the Earth, the animals that roamed, like man himself, over the Earth's surface, and the minerals hiding in the Earth's bowels, all partook of Nature's divinity.' (Arnold Toynbee - The Religious Background of the Present Environmental Crisis - International Journal of Environmental Studies 1972). 'Before ever land was, before ever the sea, Or soft hair of the grass, or fair limbs of the tree, Or flesh- colored fruit of my branches, I was : And thy soul was in me.' (Algernon Charles Swinburne - Hertha).